Prevalence of Prescribed Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Medications and Diagnosis among Canadian Preschoolers and School-Age Children: 1994–2007
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To describe trends in the prevalence of prescribed attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medication by Canadian preschoolers and school-age children and to compare these with trends in the prevalence of the ADHD diagnosis between 1994 and 2007. METHODS: Subjects participated in the National Longitudinal Survey on Children and Youth, a Canadian prospective survey collecting data biennially. Three cross-sectional samples of nonreferred children, aged 3 to 9 years and representative of Canadian children for 1994-1995 (n = 12 595), 2000-2001 (n = 13 904), and 2006-2007 (n = 14 655), were selected for the analyses. Information on prescribed medications and ADHD diagnosis was reported by each child's parents. Prevalence was estimated at each cycle, taking the child's age and sex into account. RESULTS: The estimated prevalence of prescribed medications and ADHD diagnosis in Canada was generally low (less than 3%), but higher for boys (less than 4%) and school-age children (less than 5%). Preschoolers' prevalence of both prescribed medications and ADHD diagnosis stayed stable between 1994 and 2007 (1% or less), while that of school-age children increased nearly 2-fold. Boys' prevalence was higher than that of girls, but girls show the steepest increase over time, up to 2.1-fold. The association between prescribed medications and ADHD diagnosis has strengthened during the 2000s: a greater number of medications were used for children with ADHD (from 43% in 2000 to 59% in 2007) while off-label use of prescribed medications decreased among school-age children. CONCLUSIONS: The upward trend in the prevalence of prescribed ADHD medications and ADHD diagnosis currently observed in contemporary societies is also occurring in Canada, except with preschoolers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".